Why is Silence So Terrifying?

As a horror writer and a perennial student of the human mind, I’ve become fascinated—perhaps even a little obsessed—with one simple question: what is it that truly makes us afraid? Fear is universal, yet deeply personal. The things that terrify one person may leave another completely unmoved. So why do certain scenes, stories and images burrow beneath our skin? Why do some monsters linger in our thoughts long after we’ve turned the final page or the credits have rolled? In this series I’ll be doing a deep dive into exactly what it is that terrifies us to the core and why. And also, how horror writers manipulate that feeling to keep us trembling. Welcome to The Anatomy of Fear.

Why Is Silence So Terrifying?

The most deafening sound in horror… is no sound at all. In one of my recent stories, The Book of Nightmares, a young girl touches a book. A book that no living person should ever touch:

“…the moments that preceded Lucy’s advance on this book seemed to still, for her, the sound of the rain against the windows, the whispers of the girls, the turning of pages, even the air itself – a sound that most are unaware of but the absence of which is quietly deafening.”

Horror writers and movie makers like to have a good grasp of psychology, that way they can carefully navigate your mind and activate the switches en route that will compel you to hide beneath the duvet and not want to emerge for a week. But fear – and silence in particular – has its roots grounded in nature, evolution and folklore.

The Science of Silence

The Amygdala and the Fear Circuit

Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux (NYU, Emotional Brain Institute) built much of the modern understanding of fear circuitry using Pavlovian threat-conditioning: pairing a tone with a mild shock produces a learned freeze response in the amygdala to the tone alone. LeDoux himself has argued fear isn’t simply “produced” by the amygdala like a switch — which means the same silence can be edited and reframed, which is why fiction can manipulate it so precisely.

What Does Silence Mean to You?

Lisa Feldman Barrett — constructed emotion. Barrett’s Theory of Constructed Emotion (How Emotions Are Made, 2017) argues fear isn’t a fixed circuit that fires — it’s built in the moment from more basic ingredients (interoception, prior experience, concept knowledge), the way flour, water and yeast combine into very different foods. This means the same silence can be built into “peaceful” or “terrifying” depending on context, expectation and culture.

Silence Is Uncertainty… Or Is It?

Sit in a room alone, turn off the television, close the windows then eventually your eyes. Stay that way for around thirty seconds. What do you hear? It is unlikely that your brain will interpret the sounds coming in as ‘nothing’. There might be the gentle hum of an electrical device, a fan, children playing outside or any number of noises that would ordinarily be passed off and ignored. But imagine those sounds were gone also. I’ll even take it a stage further: imagine walking down a busy street and every sound just stops. So much so, that all you can hear is your own heartbeat. That silence has created uncertainty. And fear of the unknown.

There’s a room in Minneapolis, built by Orfield Laboratories, that has repeatedly held the Guinness World Record for the quietest place on Earth — at one point measured at -24.9 decibels, which is below the threshold of human hearing. It absorbs something like 99.9% of all sound. Step inside, and the room doesn’t go quiet. You do. Visitors stop hearing the space around them and start hearing themselves instead: their own heartbeat, their blood moving, their breathing, the joints in their own body. Some report ringing in their ears that was never there before. People lose their sense of balance. Almost nobody lasts more than 45 minutes before they have to leave. That’s the trick silence plays on us, distilled into a single room. It was never nothing. It was always quietly deafening — the world just usually gives us enough noise to drown it out.

Survival Is Everything (Or So I’ve Heard)

Your body and mind have evolved to survive. Sometimes that means facing off an oncoming threat head on, other times to run fast in the opposite direction and sometimes freeze, hide and wait for the danger to pass. There is a phenomenon experienced campers describe in which an entire section of forest goes quiet “for apparently no reason.” It has a real biological basis: it’s often several species reacting to the same predator cue simultaneously. This response to a perceived threat is one that is coded into our very DNA and one of the reasons our ancestors survived. Your brain constantly predicts what it expects to hear and sudden silence like this is unexpected and therefore creates uncertainty – a threat perhaps you cannot yet see. The amygdala, the part of the brain sometimes referred to as the ‘body’s alarm system,’ has evolved to detect “ancestral threats” from predators, dangerous humans and environmental dangers fast. This can make us misread silence as dangerous even when there is no immediate danger.

Silence in Mythology and Folklore

I enjoyed the research into this tremendously and could write a whole series of posts on this alone. But I’ll exercise self-restraint.

The Banshee

Irish keening (traditional vocal lament for the dead) is itself structured around eerie moments of silence as well as outbursts of weeping — the Banshee’s mythic cry is often read as an inversion of this practice: she ‘keens’ before the death, not after. The Banshee functions as a harbinger or omen figure across Irish folklore — tied to specific family lines, her presence (and the hush around it) signals death is coming, not that it has come. In Highland Scottish tradition, the Washer-by-the-Ford (a similar omen figure) is only seen – silently – washing bloodstained clothes before a violent death.

Scandinavia

The Huldra, or skogsrå (“hidden one”), is a forest spirit across Norwegian and Swedish folklore. Crucially, a sudden stillness in the forest may signal that she’s nearby — an almost identical motif to the bird-silence phenomenon mentioned earlier, but reframed as folklore rather than biology. Rural communities spoke of her in hushed tones and treated respect for the forest’s silence as protective practice, not superstition for its own sake.

Japan

The concept of ma (間) — conscious, meaningful emptiness or negative space — underlies much of Japanese horror’s use of silence. Films like The Ring, The Grudge and Dark Water build dread through sustained quiet rather than incident. A commonly cited cultural preference: many Japanese viewers find a silent, motionless ghostly figure far more frightening than an active or noisy one — stillness itself is the threat. And as we have touched upon silence and how it is used in folklore, let’s take a dive into the world of cinema and literature.

Silence on Screen

A Quiet Place (2018)

The design philosophy from the film’s sound team: “silence is not the lack of sound — it’s the presence of threat.” Ambient layers are deliberately stripped just before a scare so the brain registers the absence more than any added sound would register a presence. In several scenes the sound designers used true “digital zero” silence when the deaf character removes her hearing aids — reported by the designers themselves as the moments that affected test audiences most.

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Music is well used to create and release tension and is very effective in horror, however The Blair Witch Project has no musical score at all — strict found-footage realism means every sound has to be diegetic (what the handheld camera would actually pick up). Its most cited scare works purely through silence following sound: Josh’s screams are followed by nothing — his subsequent absence and silence is reported as more disturbing than the screams themselves.

Alien (1979)

And of course we can’t speak of the effectiveness of silence as a horror device in cinema without mentioning Ridley Scott’s Alien. Scott establishes the Nostromo’s early scenes in near-silence — minimal dialogue, almost no ambient noise or score — so the ship’s normal quiet is legible before it’s broken. The tagline “In space no one can hear you scream” is more than a marketing pearl — it states the film’s actual sound-design premise: the vacuum of space removes the possibility of an audible warning system entirely. This premise was also adopted in the popular game Alien: Isolation, in which the player’s only objective is to stay quiet, hide and survive.

Silence in Horror Literature

And from the literary world, some of my heroes:

“And now at the dead hour of the night, amid the dreadful silence of that old house, so strange a noise as this excited me to uncontrollable terror.” — Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart

And I can’t resist a little close read of this: this sentence screams silence and anticipation and spends nearly its whole length getting you into position before anything happens. Poe also uses “amid” rather than “in.” You’re not standing in an empty room; you’re immersed in something with bulk and weight — silence becomes something tangible that you’re submerged in.

“Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity. There was nothing within hearing, and nothing in sight save a vast reach of black slime; yet the very completeness of the stillness and the homogeneity of the landscape oppressed me with a nauseating fear.” — H.P. Lovecraft, Dagon

And another close read: Lovecraft here builds dread by undermining his own narration — “Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words” gives him more of a vulnerable, human quality. Then look at the verb in “the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence.” Dwell implies habitation, something living inside a place. But silence is definitionally empty. Lovecraft fuses presence and absence into a single verb: the horror doesn’t happen in the silence, it lives there.

“…silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.” — Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

This one’s quite insidious: “Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House.” “Lay” is doing a lot of work here. She isn’t saying the house is quiet — Jackson is giving the silence more of a definite form, weight and position, creating an unsettling, claustrophobic feel.

“That frightened him, but one thing frightened him more; what had awakened him? He was under the impression that there had been some sound, some— He held his breath, listening over the papery rustle of his heart. Here was a sound—not the same one that had awakened him, but something. The faint creak of hinges.” — Stephen King, Pet Sematary

As with the birds in the forest I mentioned earlier, King creates anticipation through interruption, following the word “sound” with an immediate silence. The dash does more than any adjective could. There is a lot more to admire in those passages and, as a keen reader, the temptation to embellish is great. But I shall resist, as there’s one passage left to put through this treatment — mine.

Close Read: The Book of Nightmares

And since I’ve just spent four paragraphs pulling apart better writers than me, it only seems fair to turn the same scrutiny on my own line from earlier. The Book of Nightmares is a story set in the Timor universe and can be found on my Substack. Now, after that shameless self-promotion, on with the reading: “The moments that preceded Lucy’s advance on this book seemed to still, for her…” — notice the sentence doesn’t actually give Lucy the power to silence the room. The moments do it, to her. She’s not the one acting; she’s the one it happens to, which is the position I wanted her in. And “advance on this book” was a deliberate choice over something gentler like “reached for” — advancing is what you do toward a threat, not a shelf. The list that follows — rain, whispers, pages, then “even the air itself” — is built to climb, each item quieter and less obviously a sound than the last, until you reach something that isn’t really sound at all in any way we’d normally recognise it. And the sentence spends its whole length getting there so that “quietly deafening” lands as a single, unexplained contradiction, rather than a phrase that announces its own cleverness. Which brings me back to that anechoic chamber. Every version of silence I’ve thrown at you in this chapter — the amygdala’s alarm bells, Barrett’s constructed emotion, birds going quiet in a forest, a Banshee’s hush before her cry, a Japanese ghost that doesn’t need to move to terrify you, a hedge maze of horror writers withholding a sound until exactly the wrong moment — is the same discovery arrived at from a different direction. Silence was never empty. It was never the absence of something happening. It was the sound of us, finally listening closely enough to notice what had been there all along.

Silence and My Work

As a neurodivergent author I have an ongoing interest in silence. I welcome it more than most and don’t feel the need to fill an elongated pause in conversation with noise. I have always felt instantly relaxed by the absence of noise, but research into this topic has opened my ears to the fact that what I perceive as silence is not silence at all, and that true silence would mean cutting out those subtle noises that culminate to form a familiar and therefore welcoming environment. If you’d like to delve into the world of Timor (my psychological/paranormal horror novel due for release next year) you can follow my Substack. Most stories, graphics and audio narration are completely free. Paid subscribers (the equivalent of buying me a black coffee a month) are welcome too, of course, and will receive a free signed copy of the Timor novel and the audiobook once it is released.